My good and long standing friend came to stay with us for a few days and we discovered that he has traded his hybrid car for a pure battery car. It is a lovely thing to drive. Basically it is a battery on wheels with no engine. At the lights, you can rocket off and leave the other cars standing. It has all the electronic whistles and bells and you can see how your reverse parking is doing on an A4 sized screen in full Technicolor.

It tells you how many miles you’ve got left and they’re in lies the problem. If you are charging at home and that does involve having a street level property with garage space in the forecourt and have a smart meter you can charge during the night for very little say 10 pence a kilowatt hour. If you are unfortunate enough to get caught on a motorway and want a quick charge you will be paying 40 pounds for the privilege. My friend was going from Midsomer Norton were I live to Kent and then to Southwold in Suffolk and then to Manchester. If your range is 250 miles and you get down to 50 miles then this would be where range anxiety would click in big time.

You have to be at your destination by a certain time, and you spy a service station with charging points but alas they are all in use. You will have to wait to get access and then another half hour to receive a charge to enable you to move on to the next point of call be it the next charging point or a home destination when you can plug in to the main supply and get some sort of trickle charge. My friends said that my own domestic veins could supplies say one kettle’s worth of energy, the charge he has at home you could say two kettles worth of energy. The commercial heavy duty chargers are 15 kettles worth.

If you have a sanguine temperament, do not have screaming children in the car, and are not particular about when you arrive at your destination, I would have thought that an electric vehicle is the way to go. If you need to be 100% reliable then either a hybrid or a petrol-driven engine would seem to minimize the tension that must go with the range anxiety. I would certainly not sign up.

It is difficult on purely economic grounds to compare the costs because you have the cost of producing the raw materials for the battery, it’s comparatively expensive price range for such cars, and you have to factor in the cost of motorway charging versus home charging,

if you have a ground level accommodation where you can put the suitable plugs in then that’s good. If you are living in a flat away from the ground floor, or one without parking space, then I pretty much say forget it.   In the early days the EV cars for business purposes enjoyed the Government subsidy, but that subsidy has ceased and Joe Public does not have access.

# Also the insurance tends to be more expensive

# Also because the car is heavier it will cause greater damage to the road surface.

# Another factor is the effect on the environment. Current government policies based on fake science and lack of measurement for example there is no evidence that the pollution in London is any worse than elsewhere and as for zero carbon, we don’t have enough of it. It is currently around 400 parts per million were in fact the ideal level should be between 1000 and 2,000 parts per million.

Overall it is noticeable that car sales have not taken off as hoped for and that the government, because they refused to listen to qualified independent experts, have got their figures and their timing wrong.

So, anyone thinking of getting a car I have just introduced some of the problems that I have noticed.

I hope that is of some use to someone